


Guest Column

by wtb



Category: Matthew Swift Series - Kate Griffin
Genre: Gen, Newspapers, Urban Fantasy, Urban Legends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:46:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wtb/pseuds/wtb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Swift delivers a Christmas message, like he's the bloody Queen. But hey, if BoJo can do it so can he.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guest Column

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plingo_kat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plingo_kat/gifts).



  
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### Speaker's Corner

#### Matthew Swift

Gather 'round, scryers and sorcerers; come ye, taggers and inkers and covens of the M25. Your unelected official* was given the foreword this time, the hallowed editor's column,** and we intend to use it.

Seeing how it's That Time again, you’ll have noticed that Regent Street flickers with the live, heaving power of Wizzard and Hamleys combined, and thrums with the almighty beat of the shoppers' feet above and the strain of the Piccadilly line below. If you count the ravens of the Tower, thank the supernatural force of your choice that three are traditionally missing because we’d all be fucked if tourists knew what would _really_ happen if their number were complete. But they’re still there, safe and plump, pumping their earnings and belief into our veins, and now that the city pays its due to winter in the lives of the homeless, why don't I tell you a Christmas tale: about how the Beggar King came to be.

Sure, you've heard _some_ version of it, and in all likelihood your version is true; there are as many true stories in the streets as there are lies, and even the lies acquire the quality of truth when they're used to survive and push through, when they give you that barrier between sticking around to see your kid do well and the welcome cold of the river. All stories are true where reality is not defined by papers, and your existence doesn’t hang upon proof of address.

I'm ready to bet that the one you heard starts in Bethnal Green, but trust us when I tell you it's in Dalston. And you know it too, if you've ever glanced around the place from the window of your bus: nowhere else that central does the aura of Closed Business linger for so long. So follow us behind the rusty bars of any former shop you choose, one of those garage-sized boxes that can fit more stock than a Tardis, full of wares that even a time-bending alien would find eccentric and obscure. You'll need a wish too, an item that you can't find anywhere else any more because the one shop that stocked it - you guessed it - closed. That's where we're going. Wish hard, or you'll get lost.

And here’s what you need to know about the Beggar King: he, or she, since even the Bag Lady is a man sometimes, won’t be picked from the ranks of just about anyone. If you think the hierarchy is bad and unfair here among the mortals, you can imagine what it’s like the deeper in you go. No, it has to be somebody who’s authority to begin with, who’s comfortable with power, and who won’t spare a second thought when it comes to ordering others to do the dirty work. Yeah, I said it: the King has got to be a prick. (If you’re reading this, your majesty, you know it as well as I. Besides, it’s not like the Midnight Mayor is any better.***) The point is, you need a special kind of entitled arse to keep his wits around when life strikes _hard_ , harder than you read in the papers or the local government reports, and there’s nothing more appropriate than an Alderman down on his luck.

And you thought the Parliament was bad, shuffling nobodies around.

It took our man a while to get there. We’re talking eighties here when greed was good, Loadsamoney passed for comedy, and our little community lost Lord Iron to a Lady as the railways sold and the mines died out. I can’t say I remember much of this myself, even if we can, but I do know that the hero of our story had it good at this point in life. Nothing extravagant enough to attract the attention of potentially troublesome employers, but nothing less than that either; after all, knowing how to divine the stock exchange led him first to a job in the City with a firm that will remain nameless, and then to the favour of a promising MP.****

If this is starting to sound like a mafia morality tale, you’ll be disappointed. Our hero prospered, scattered his name and his face through interviews and business cards, bet the fragments of his soul in six time zones and corresponding casinos, and came out on top. _Then_ he got greedy.

He was hardly alone, of course. Anyone over fifty can tell you about the auction house that nearly ran Sotheby’s into the ground and forced it to move abroad. The _special_ market is mostly dead now thanks to Health and Safety and the common sense of our predecessor, but at that time you really could get eternal parking spaces in Chelsea, or trap a competitor in a neon tube if you knew where to look and had something to bargain with. He had both, and not only had he secured himself a decent retirement, he had enough left over to gamble it away in games designed to impress his unspoken boss. Dozens like him made a living chasing luxury goods, whether through irrational number Ceefax pages, tracing spells encoded in digital watches, or Filofaxed meeting notes.

Before you accuse me of nostalgia, I'm not forgetting the ridiculous mobiles. We had fun with those.

At some point, as these things inevitably do, and particularly when driven by the forces of probability that spike around stock brokers, the game moved from the dens of Guildford and Kensington shops to the less savoury streets; 'more expensive' turned to 'rarer' and 'rarer' to 'far less legal'. Dodging the law was always a given but now it got up to an art, and that little shop I mentioned - you know the kind, no matter where yours is - replaced the phones and the auction house. And with it came a certain desperation, a loosening of the grip on stats and odds, an old beggar's cataract on one's third eye. But give our man some credit for thinking he could hack it: it was still a world of speculation, and passing for a divvie was no less treasured a glamour than it would be in the City.

Or maybe his was the real deal: he still did well. But there was one aspect that he missed, a plain little fact at the heart of all the complications. You all know how important words are, how strong when literal (and if you don’t, start learning now); when the word ‘exclusive’ starts to mean something so unique that people have to die for there to be only _one_ practitioner of some specific art, only one last object, only one true key... you get the point. For magic to work there have to be patterns, and for a market to work there has to be less _intervention_. To think that this little world ate itself up on the eve of the Big Bang has a splendid irony about it, but an even better one is that our crafty hunter of singular spells turned out to be the ultimate goal of a whole other hunt.

The Beggar King was dying, you see. It’s even more of a job requirement than it is for the Mayor.

There’s no morality play irony at work. The man who would take up the coat and trainers of office didn’t join the ranks of the homeless because he mistreated one before, though he probably had. It wasn’t even punishment for greed because I still need to see that happen to anyone — and remember that he didn’t precisely lose a title even if he lost his name, nor power to command even if he feels the cold and wet and the wind on his fingers and feet worse than any of his flock. It was _circumstances_ , it was _stupid_ , it was step by mundane step of the initiation that dozens of others make daily; it was that he’d put more trust in material objects than the ethereal numbers of a hidden bank, and woke to find an Asda bag to hold more value than the aforementioned genie tube.

If anything made him different than anyone else who took this path and had the same magic prick credentials, it was that he sometimes did give to the needy and sometimes even gave regularly without having to be accosted by well-meaning kids with clipboards. That’s it.

The MP is still in Whitehall of course, but that’s a whole other world and I’m still not sure how red-tape-o-mancy even works.

So how does this make for a heartwarming Christmas tale? Buggered if I know. He’s got a beard, the guy off the Coke advert has a beard, and it happened around this time of the year. Come to think of it, it might’ve been in Bethnal Green after all. It always is, with Beggar Kings.

Listen. All is bollocks apart from something somebody once wrote about the invisible folk: _Give, and ask no questions._ We hear these words echo as we walk, see them etched into walls in the guise of graffiti; you’ll look away, as people do, but the girl you avoid still chants ‘Big Issue’ and the man who asked you for bus fare might be lying about a home to get to but he’s trying to get _somewhere_ , and unless you’ve been appointed gatekeeper by some higher agency because you’re so flipping special, _let him_. Then go home to your friends or family, eat and be merry, and thank your luck that your life is the good kind of incomplete. You can let go of that wish now.

Oh yeah, and give a call to someone you’d forgotten. Santa here will know if you did, so don’t mess around.

____  
* To the more _concerned_ among us: at least it's not Brussels for once, so shut it.  
** Let me guess: you don't think there's anything to this space, that the existence of the PCC and the daily freebies squeezed out any power left in news dispatches. Next time you find yourself feeding your loved one a dodgy aphrodisiac because Jamie swore on it in Sainsbury's Instore Digest, think again.  
*** To anyone thinking of quoting what I wrote here back in ‘03 to prove what a pillock I am: yeah, you were right. Now go get yourself a gold star and a pint of Stella.  
**** Also nameless because no-one is that much of an idiot to get themselves slapped with a super-super-injunction. But if you read far enough back through the 1998 issues of _How To Spend It_ , I’m told it’s all there anyway. _Don't worry Kelly, no one is going to sue us._

HEADLINE: Immigration caps on magic workers: what does it mean for us?  
 _Home Secretary ridicules the unions_

New reports on Covent Garden 'tourist power'

The plight of Blackpool banshees

INTERVIEW: Sir Ian McKellen on Hobbits, curses, and Hackney Empire

FEATURE: Reinventing Fleet Street  
 _The aura of the press is long gone; we ask business mages what they see in store next_

Scrying with regional ales

REVIEW: 'Bakker: an Unofficial Biography'

Latest haunted virus 'not a hoax', security experts say

What Simon Cowell isn't telling us

Detecting sorcerers at a young enough age  
 _How to talk to your children_

Latest tweets:  
  
 ** **urbanmagicmag** Op Ed from London's Midnight Mayor, everyone!  t.co/67ddf450**  
 ** **urbanmagicmag** @neon_princess Thank you!**  
 ** **urbanmagicmag** @purgewithfire Perhaps in the United States**  
 ** **urbanmagicmag** @purgewithfire We wouldn't be saying that in public if we were you**  
 ** **urbanmagicmag** Why we syndicate Mystic Meg  t.co/g7yytx3x**


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